Pollock

📙 Since his premature death in 1956, the American painter Jackson Pollock has become a symbolic figure - symbolic of the abstract expressionist movement which has placed American art, for the first time, in the forefront of artistic progress, and of which he was one of the principal members. In his early years he was a romantic realist in a manner typical of much American art of the 1930s, but by the end of the decade he was becoming attracted by surrealism, especially by the work of Andre Masson, the French painter who was to emigrate to the United States a few years later. But though Pollock used the automatic, unpremeditated methods of Masson, he developed his style to the point at which he was able to convey concrete pictorial sensations, divorced from the recognizable images, drawn from the subconscious, which were characteristic of surrealist painting. In 1947 he began using a technique (which was to be widely adopted) of allowing paint to drip from the brush or vessel on to a canvas placed on the floor. His late works executed in this way are composed of astonishingly delicate traceries of coloured lines - intensely personal visions of pure harmony which have inspired a whole new generation of painters.